Its always better to keep the gain to absolute minimum before the final stages of the receiver, that way you preserve as much of the dynamic range available.

I do like these small radios. They deliver an enormous sense of satisfaction and surprising reliability for what they are. All brought about because of the need in India to have a inexpensive transceiver for the ham bands.

I used this homebrew 20M rig on a successful SOTA activation yesterday. 5W output, and the impetus for this project was my desire for an analog CW speed control. The rest of the setup consisted of a pair of earbuds, a 1300mAH 11.1V battery and a set of PicoPaddles.

The antenna is a tuned 20M EFHW with an SWR of 1.2:1 across the low end of 20M- no tuner needed. It connects to the rig with a 6-foot (2m) length of RG-174- BNCs at both ends.

This is a picture of my military PRC319 on top of Pikes Peak, W0C/FR-004.It runs 50W to a backpack mounted 10 foot whip.ps: I have one for sale, shipping only to the USA, $2000.See cool PRC319 Action Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McNku5YOvCg.Paul w0rw

I know that many frown upon this as it's a "cheap chinese rig from an unknown manufacturer", and I was also just as sceptical myself. Luckily a HAM operator close to me bought this and tested it, and I was able to get a few QSO's with him on it before purchasing it.

During these weeks I've had around 600 QSO's with this rig, all on 20m SSB. It has a few issues where it's clear that this is a cheaper rig than the "normal" brands, but still the audio quality is very good. I saw no noticeable difference between the sent and received reports on this vs my "old" Kenwood TS480SAT. For a battery I use a 10Ah LiPo car booster pack, which lasts for at least 3 hours / 160 QSO's (the most I tested with).

This is my FT-817 setup (non-ND)I have a homemade linked dipole for 40/30/20m on top. Sotabeams 125W balun at the center, drilled PVC pipe for insulators, Powerpoles for links. I've got 75ft of poly rope with a small carabiner on one end and a padlock on the other - The padlock is my throwing weight and the carabiner clips to my balun to hoist it.I've got 2 accessories for the FT-817 - A DYC-8x7 speech processor for SSB and a Wolphilink for PSK31 with my Android (though I haven't had a chance to really use it yet and I think it needs some tuning)50ft of RG-58A/U coax with adapters for BNC and UHFI usually use the black battery pack (6AH, 3A max) but I can go down to the 3 cell 18650 pack if I want (3AH 10A max).The little breathmint pack holds a USB charger that takes 6-40VDC, and I made a little Powerpole splitter so I can charge my phone and run my rig at the same time - My phone has terrible battery life and might need life support if I run PSK31.